Constance “Connie” Marie Paris was — like many girls — hypnotized by the Beatles, so when John, Paul, George and Ringo played at Red Rocks on Aug. 23, 1964, she was in the amphitheater gasping for air and jumping up and down with five other Englewood High School freshman girls.

Paris loved to be around people and she was friendly to a fault. She had been in Campfire Girls and was very active at her church.

The vivacious girl liked to water ski. She studied hard enough to carry a 3.4 grade point average, but not so much that she missed out on school and church events. She joined the pep club and loved going to football games with a large group of friends.

Connie was a beautiful girl with a matching personality, said her friend Diane Riechert, who met Connie in the seventh grade and was a close friend through high school. When a group of girls got together and started making prank calls, Connie said they should be careful not to hurt anybody.

She loved to curl her “honey, wheat-colored” hair every night, her mother, Mary Lou Paris, 85, said. On one camping trip to Jackson Lake her daughter had to improvise. She used small metal orange juice cans as the curlers. She got so upset when mosquitoes swarmed around her all night.

On a Friday night, she recalled many times that Connie and her friends would come home from a football game and change their clothes in her house on Lincoln Street because of its proximity to the high school so they could go to a dance together.

In March of 1968, Connie was only two months from graduating from high school and had spoken about her plans to go to a community college and some day work in a medical research laboratory.

Connie had two younger brothers, Chris, then 15, and Jeff, then 10. Jeff loved his older sister, who would often come to his defense during squabbles with his older brother, Mary Lou Riechert recalled. Connie had a running competition with her dad, a post office carrier, over crossword puzzles.

Mary Lou Paris said she and her husband would never argue with each other in front of their three kids.

Connie had just been hired as a waitress at a restaurant with a Robin Hood theme at the Cinderella City shopping center. She had to wear a funky hat with a feather and moccasins.

The 24-year-old woman rode her bike under the 5th Street Viaduct, a railroad bridge, shortly after she was last seen.

Her parents soon reported that she was missing.

Railroad employees found Oliverson’s bike and shoes under a bridge. But it would take nearly 20 days before a connection was made between Oliverson’s belongings and her disappearance.

Grand Junction detectives James Fromm and Doug Rushing started investigating the strange disappearance only after Colorado Bureau of Investigation investigator Bob Perkins recognized that the missing person case was similar to several others in Colorado, California, Washington and Utah.

Fromm said Perkins, who was based in an office in Montrose, was way ahead of his time in recognizing pattern murders that would later be called “serial” murders.

Back then different law enforcement agencies rarely communicated and the idea that certain killers would prey on multiple victims was not considered that frequently, Fromm said.

But Perkins kept notes on similarities between cases.

The circumstances of Oliverson’s disappearance was remarkably similar to a number of missing person cases involving young women.

Caryn Campbell, 23

She had long, dark brown hair that was parted in the middle. She was thin and pretty at 5-feet-4. She weighed 105 pounds.

Oliverson looked like Caryn Campbell, 23, of Dearborn, Mich. Campbell had left a Snowmass restaurant on Jan. 12, 1975 to get a magazine from her hotel room when she disappeared.

Her nude, frozen body was found beside a road near Aspen on Feb. 17, 1975.

Campbell had severe trauma to the head and it appeared her hands had been tied behind her back. It also appeared that someone had thrown her body out of a car.

Joe, who had two older brothers and a younger sister, had long chestnut-colored hair that covered his ears and went below his shirt collar in the back. His friends nicknamed him “Taco” because of his copper complexion. He was 150 pounds and stood 5-feet-9.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.